29 July 2014

When the European Commission was laying
the foundations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
- TTIP, also known as TAFTA by analogy with NAFTA - it was doubtless
hoping that the public would ignore it, just as it had ignored
countless other boring trade agreements. But of course TTIP is not
principally a trade agreement: it aims to go far beyond "merely"
liberalising trade by attacking "behind the border"
barriers.

These "non-tariff barriers" -
NTBs - are what you and I call health and safety regulations,
environmental protection, labour laws etc. They are all things that
make life a more pleasant place - especially in Europe, where they
are particularly strong; but they are also things that decrease the
profits of companies that must obey them. TTIP is about removing as
many of these as possible, so as to boost corporate profits.

Let me be clear on this very important point: we are not lowering
standards in TTIP. Our standards on consumer protection, on the
environment, on data protection and on food are not up for
negotiation. There is no “give and take” on standards in TTIP.

Simple logic tells us that this can't possibly be true. If two
completely different regulatory systems are to be brought together -
the avowed aim of TTIP - there are only three possibilities. Either
the side with the higher standards levels down; the side with the
lower standards levels up; or there is mutual recognition of each
other's standards. The US has clearly stated that it is not prepared
to level up - it won't accept EU bans on chlorine-washed chickens,
hormone beef or GMOs.

Mutual recognition, although apparently different, is in fact
identical to levelling down: if both regulations are acceptable,
manufacturers working to the higher set will be at a disadvantage commercially. They will therefore either relocate their factories
to the country with the lower standards, which are cheaper to implement, or lobby for the higher
standards to be levelled down, threatening either to leave the
country, or shut down. Politicians always give in to this kind of
blackmail, so EU standards would inevitably be lowered to those of
the US as a result of mutual recognition.

But it has become increasingly clear that there is another way for
the European Commission to circumvent its own promises that TTIP
will not lower standards. The trick here is that the European
Commission will lower standards *before* TTIP; so technically speaking it is not TTIP that brings about that dilution -
it occurred "independently". Thus the Commission will be
able to put its hand on its heart and swear blind that it kept its
word not to sell out EU standards in TTIP, while at the same time
changing the regulatory context in such a way that the US will be
able to export things that are currently banned by strict EU
legislations.

Since its inception in 2009, the Fuel Quality Directive
(FQD),
a European Union regulation aimed at reducing the climate
impact of transport fuels, has been attacked by powerful lobby
interests that do not want the EU to take action to curtail the
use
of particularly greenhouse gas intensive fossil fuels.

...

these attempts to weaken this landmark climate policy
seem to
have been successful. If recent media reports are
correct, the
European Commission has decided to significantly weaken the FQD and
align its regulatory standards
with the wishes of the oil industry,
the US trade negotiators [for TTIP] and the Canadian government.
Compared to a previous
proposal from 2011, it would be considerably
less effective
in cleaning up Europe’s transport fuels and
preventing the
most climate polluting fuels, including tar sands,
from entering Europe.

Most recently, we have learned that the European Commission is
preparing to allow endocrine disruptors in pesticides - another key
demand from the US side in TTIP. Unfortunately, the source for this
information, Inside US Trade, is behind a paywall, so I can't give a
link, but will just quote a couple of key passages:

One of the options proposed by the commission in a June
17 "roadmap" is to shift from the current EU approach of
banning the use of all endocrine disruptors in pesticides toward a
model that could allow them to be used as long as certain steps are
taken to mitigate the risk.

This risk assessment-based model is favored by the U.S. and EU
pesticide industries and is the approach employed under the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency's "Endocrine Disruptor Screening
Program." Such a model seeks to evaluate both whether a hazard
exists and if it can be mitigated by limiting exposure, in order to
allow the marketing of an otherwise dangerous product.

As you can see, this amounts to abandoning the EU's Precautionary
Principle, and adopting the completely different risk-based approach of
the US. Aside from the fact that
this shows that the European Commission's promises that standards
would not fall, that the EU would not be forced to adopt US
approaches, and that public health in Europe would always be
safeguarded, were worthless, this also disregards the EU's Treaty of Lisbon, which explicitly states:

Union
policy on the environment shall aim at a high level of protection
taking into account the diversity of situations in the various
regions of the Union. It shall be based on the precautionary
principle and on the principles that preventive action should be
taken, that environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at
source and that the polluter should pay.

What's
particularly interesting about the latest move by the European
Commission is that the industry sources in the article quoted above point out that it represents a move to a "science-based" approach, something they have been demanding (note, too, that Owen Paterson also spoke of "scientific development" in the passage quoted above.)

This is part of
consistent campaign to paint the Precautionary Principle as
"unscientific". In fact, this reframing is precisely what I predicted would happen a year ago. The key point is
that "science" in the abstract does not exist: there is a
continuum of good science and bad science - where the latter often includes experiments carried out by corporate scientists
who miraculously produce results that match their paymaster's
desires.

It's not just me saying this. Yesterday the following article appeared in the Guardian on the subject of pesticide research
- the area that the European Commission wants to overhaul
radically, moving towards a "science-based" approach:

Criticial
future research on the plight of bees risks being tainted by
corporate funding, according to a report from MPs published on
Monday. Pollinators play a vital role in fertilising three-quarters
of all food crops but have declined due to loss of habitat, disease
and pesticide use. New scientific research forms a key part of the
government’s plan to boost pollinators but will be funded by
pesticide manufacturers.

That
is, as I pointed out, when companies pay for research, they tend to
get the answers they want.

“When
it comes to research on pesticides, the Department of Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is content to let the manufacturers
fund the work,” said EAC chair Joan Walley. “This testifies to a
loss of environmental protection capacity in the department
responsible for it. If the research is to command public confidence,
independent controls need to be maintained at every step. Unlike
other research funded by pesticide companies, these studies also need
to be peer-reviewed and published in full”.

This
again is something that I advocated last year. If companies want us
to take their results seriously - and in principle I don't
have problem with that, provide the science is sound and independent
- then they must publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals
and, crucially, publish *all* of their results as open data, for anyone to check
and explore further. If they won't do that, we will know that they
have something to hide.

In
the meanwhile, expect the European Commission to start invoking
"science-based" approaches to policy more and more, and
that these strangely always mean that the European Union should lower
its standards to those of the US, which already uses this "tainted"
approach.

But
however the Commission wants to package this massive shift, and
whatever lipstick it puts on this particular pig (sorry, pigs,
nothing personal), this is a fundamental betrayal at the very deepest
level. It is truly disgraceful - not to mention ungrateful - that at every turn the European
Commission seems to prefer to serve US corporations rather than the
European public that pays the Commissioners' not-inconsiderable
salaries. It's another reason why the whole of TTIP - not just the already terminal ISDS - must be rejected.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.